A Critical Discourse Analysis of Dietary Recommendations of Medical Associations and Research Articles on Hypertension Disease
Abstract
"Critical discourse analysis (CDA) is a type of discourse analytical research that primarily studies the way social power abuse, dominance, and inequality are enacted, reproduced, and resisted by text and talk in the social and political context" (Van Dijk p. 353). This study aims to investigate the language use between medical associations and research articles through Van Dijk’s Semantic Macrostructure model of Critical Discourse Analysis. This study is qualitative in nature. The data was collected from ten medical research articles on high blood pressure disease from PubMed and Science Direct. These articles were purposefully selected from 2010 to 2020. Similarly, the association’s dietary recommendations are selected for the comparison. These selected associations are the World Health Organization, the Mayo Clinic, the American Health Organization, and the American Health Associations. Van Dijk’s macrostructure rules have been applied only with the dietary recommendations suggested by associations and articles. The data has been analyzed using the categories defined by Van Dijk, i.e. Generalization, Deletion, Selection and Construction through AntConc (Version 4.0.10). The findings of the study revealed that medical associations usually omit the details of their discourse. Generalization and deletion have been highly observed in medical associations. As far as research articles are concerned, they have built macro-propositions by providing adequate details about each and every recommendation. They focused on the aspect that every piece of information is important and nothing is irrelevant. It has been observed that, associations present the abstracting details to propagate certain ideologies and hidden agendas and divert public attention toward particular brands and products. Furthermore, the producers of medical discourse attempted to impose a large influence of their underlying beliefs and objectives on public minds. As a result, with the support of capitalism, the medical discourse of associations has been badly influenced.
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